Jay Papasan:
Winners quit, inbox zero is a complete waste of time, and if you’re financing luxury right now, we’re probably not gonna agree on this podcast. Today, I’m gonna share 15 hills I’m prepared to die on, most of them hard-won, not just through reading, but by making lots and lots of mistakes. And by the end of this podcast, you’ll probably agree with some of them, disagree with some of them. My hope is you’ll start thinking about what are your hills to die on, so that you don’t have to learn the hard mistakes again and again.
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Jay Papasan:
I’m Jay Papasan, and this is The ONE Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results.
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Jay Papasan:
A long time ago, I stumbled upon Charlie Munger, this is Warren Buffett’s partner at Berkshire Hathaway. He gave a speech at USC’s business school. And in it, he shared his latticed work of mental models. And he talked about – and this is one of the first times that they shared – how much of their investing acumen came from just reading books. He and Warren Buffett were a collector of frameworks on how people behave and how they think. And they believed if they had these frameworks, these models for how we approach problems and challenges and our own biases, they could make better decisions for their investors, hopefully better than their competitors over time. And that proved to be incredibly true for Buffett and Munger.
And that weird latticework, I can’t remember how many were in there, but it was from every discipline: science, biology, you name it, but they were basically, these are the ground truths about how life works. And if you don’t try to fight that, you’ll have a better life. And so, I learned some from there, and I eventually looked up and thought, “You know what? Maybe I should start writing these down.” Not just his, but what are the things that I kind of believe to be true as a businessperson, as a father, as an investor, so that I’m a lot less likely to keep repeating the same mistakes.
And I created a list. Right now, I think there’s eighty-eight on that list. It’s a little notes document that I carry around. And when I find myself in that situation where, “Wait, I’ve thought about this before. What did I decide last time?”, I can go quickly search it and think about things a little bit more deeply ’cause I’m logging in to my past self who just made a horrible mistake and then wrote down my learning from it, and I can apply that wisdom in the moment to whatever is new.
And so, that’s my hope for you by the end of this, is that maybe you’ll write down your own mental models, create your own little list. What are the things that are true for me as a businessperson, as a parent, as a spouse? Whatever the categories that are important to you.
So, today, I’m gonna roll through fifteen of these. Some of them are kind of big thinking, some of them are contrarian thinking, and some of them are pretty conventional, but the truth that we just need to be reminded of. My encouragement to you is don’t treat them as commandments for you. Ask the question, “Do I agree with Jay? Do I not agree with him? Why?” And then, that becomes your ground truth.
The ones that make you angry or you’re like, “No freaking way,” are probably the ones that you need to think about because when we are anchored in a truth that may not be true is when we are most likely to do ourselves some harm. I think a few of these will actually may even be controversial, ’cause my take is not the conventional take. If you disagree, feel free to say something in the comments, and we’ll pick up the conversation there. I’m always open to changing my mind, and that’s often how these came about.
So, I’m gonna dive in starting with some that are grouped around the people we get to work with, the people that are in the room.
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Jay Papasan:
All right, so the first one we’ll call careers versus contractors. I’ve worked in a lot of different businesses. My wife and I have run a bunch of businesses. And we’ve had to get clear about when are we hiring someone to be an employee, and when are we actually gonna bring someone on to be a contractor? And in my experience as a teacher and coach, I see a lot of people get confused. They hire people to be employees, but then they treat them like contractors. They’re not building a career. They’re not helping them see a career and a path forward. They’re not trying to help them learn how to think so that they can grow in the job.
And don’t get me wrong, if you’re gonna hire people, in a lot of businesses, there is a time and a place to bring contractors. I don’t have anything against it. But if you’re gonna bring someone on as an employee, I think you have a little bit of an obligation. They have an obligation to help you build your business, and you have an obligation to help them build their career. And the payoff may not be immediate. I might be into that weird, shaky realm of karma here, but in my experience that when you invest in your people, there is no greater return on investment. Not everyone pays off, but the ones who do, who see you as a path to getting their dreams fulfilled because you’re open to letting the business expand to include their dreams, those are the employees, and there’s not a million of them, they’re always in the minority, that will absolutely help your company become a rocket ship.
But it requires a different state of mind. They’re not there to just serve your needs. It’s a mutual conversation. It’s a contract that goes both ways. They are building your wealth, and you should be helping them build their career. So, my challenge to you is when you look at your staff, who are the ones that truly stand out that are actually employees? And have I been a good leader to them in helping them build a career within my business? Am I willing for it to expand to include their dreams?
I think that when we are open to that kind of thinking, yeah, sometimes we’ll get burned, but the payoff is the 10x, 100x kind of people that end up treating your business like it’s their own, and there is no greater ROI in business than that.
All right, hill number two, this is EAs versus AIs. I’m seeing a lot of people leverage AI, and the first place that they’re going to eliminate cost is they’re cutting their operational staff. And I get it. AI is really good at doing repetitive tasks again and again. But kind of dovetailing off the last one, you have to ask the question, if I go all in on AI, I get some predictability, I get some scale that I may not be able to get from humans, but what am I also giving up?
I’ve come to believe, and I mean firmly, that the best leaders often have a number two, an EA, a chief of staff, an executive business partner, you name it, that is their kind of perfect pairing. They complement them. They are also helping them with strategic thinking. They’re not just a tasker, not a personal assistant or an administrative assistant. They’re an operational leader. And that pairing becomes a superpower for that leader.
We’ve seen it, you’ve seen it, that certain duos out there are kind of dynamic, and their ability to do things together is greater than the sum of their parts. I’ve had nine different EAs in my career, and a handful of them have been truly extraordinary. They have taken my career to the next level because they understood what my priorities were, what my values were, and they helped become an extension of them in the business. And they helped get the 80% off my plate, to think about ONE Thing language, so that I could focus on the things where I bring the most value.
And frankly, this is a personal thing. I like them to be just a little bit bossy. “Hey, let me do that. Take your hands off of that. That’s my job.” I want them to own that part of the job, so thoroughly that they will literally shoo me away because let’s be frank, a lot of us go to the busy work as a place to hide. Feels productive. We’re doing something, but we’re really avoiding the more important work. And having a partner, a witness that’s there, that understands everything, they’re in your calendar, they’re in your email, there’s something incredible about that.
Now, some of you are going, “But Jay, I can do that with an amazingly trained AI bot, right? I’ll use a lot of tokens, and they will be just like that behind the scenes.” True. It’s amazing what you can accomplish with some of the AI models out there today, but they don’t bring the human warmth to your business. Having someone who’s a part of their job is to bring empathy to the work, I think that’s actually gonna distinguish the people going forward. You’ll notice the executives that have a hundred percent AI assistance, and you’ll notice those that have a human element to it. And I think that human touch is only gonna become more valuable and therefore worth the investment.
So, when it comes to EAs and AI, at the end of the day, I want an EA, a human in my corner, and I hope that they will be empowered by AI, but I want that human by my side.
One more kind of lens to look at the EA-AI equation is, like, how much of a control freak are you, right? I mean, I think if you’re leading, you’ve got a little of that in you, like you want things to be a certain way. Maybe you’ve got a very high standard is how you put it, but there’s a certain level that all of us can show up and really kind of demand that the work be a certain way. AI is an extension of that, right? Once we dial it in, we can get things exactly and perfectly the way we want them on repeat.
Now, again, there’s this thing that we’re missing there, and it’s called agency. One of my very first jobs, I worked at a steakhouse, and I remember they had zero marketing budget. And I was like, “How in the heck do you run a steakhouse with no advertising, no marketing?” And they said they wanted a hundred percent word of mouth. And what they empowered us to do was to solve problems at our own table. A very human thing to realize, “Oh, the food was late, so I have the power as a waiter, right, making less than minimum wage back then, to comp them a dessert or a free round of drinks.” The goal was fix whatever problem it was in the moment, not say, “I have to ask my manager,” or that, which is also like, “Oh great, now my dinner is being interrupted not only by bad service, but now I have to talk to a manager?” Like it actually accelerates the problem. But giving humans agency to make real decisions in the moment adds a kind of magic to the service level in your business, and I believe in that pretty firmly.
So, to kind of sum it up, are you using AI because you ultimately want control? And are you aware that by doing that, you may be giving up some of the magic, some of the agency that can happen when real humans are empowered to serve your customers?
Number three, a VA is actually a team member. When I hear a lot of people talk about virtual assistants, it’s like a step above AI. It’s that person who probably works in another country that they think of as someone to just show up and do tasks on repeat. And I think we’re losing something there. And I learned this from my wife. When you treat a VA like a team member, you might be surprised that you get an even higher return.
Here’s what I’m talking about. On our real estate team, Wendy has had five, six, seven different VAs all sourced through each other, operating in another country, the Philippines, across the world. But pretty early on, instead of having them behind the scenes on Slack, she started inviting them to her meetings and treating them like bona fide team members. When the team’s members are sharing their wins from the week, she invited the VAs to share as well. And over time, everybody got to know them each by their first names, and they became real team members.
So much so that earlier this year, if you remember my walk in Japan, my friendship walk, my wife joined me a week later. Why? Because she took all of her admins that are based right here in Austin, Texas, to the Philippines to spend time with their team in the Philippines, and it was absolutely amazing. She talked about bringing them over there, how much these people, this operation team, had relied on their VAs, but now they got to actually spend time with them, and it absolutely amplified the work. We’ve gotten amazing return on our investment in our VA team members instead of just treating them like taskers and interchangeable pieces.
So, not everyone’s gonna show up that way, but we select for it. So, just challenge your thinking. When you think about a VA, instead of thinking about it just as a cheap human resource, can you think about it as maybe an affordable team member that you can onboard to do a lot more than just task?
Number four: play up. This is really for you. It’s not about your team, but you can encourage your team members to do it. I learned the phrase play up when I was working on Mia Hamm’s book. Her parents were sharing with us that growing up, she was so much better than other girls her age that as a teenager, she was playing against men’s teams, 18 to 20-year-old men, and often getting kind of brutalized on the field. She wasn’t a big player, and she was out there trying to outduel grown men when she was still, like, in 10th or 11th grade.
And what that did for her by playing up, when she was on the men’s field, she was far from the best player. She had moments. She actually walked away feeling defeated. But the moment she stepped on to the playing field with people who were her same age, her same gender, all of those things, she suddenly looked like a superstar. And I’ve seen this show up in every arena. The goal here is when you walk into the room, you kind of want to be the dumbest person in whatever room you’re in. That will force you to grow.
I read a research paper years ago that if you want to identify the child with the highest average IQ in any classroom, pick the youngest kid. They’re developmentally behind. They have to play up just to stay relevant with their peers. Whoever is working the hardest to be at the level of the average level of the room is often growing the fastest. That’s the benefit of moving into a bigger room where you aren’t maybe the big fish anymore, but you have to play up. It forces you to grow because we all want to fit in at the end of the day.
I guess the only exception to this is don’t be the dumbest person at the poker table, right? We all know how that turns out. But in every other room in your life, maybe challenge yourself. Have I outgrown this room? Do I need to go find a bigger room and start playing up? That’s where a lot of magical growth happens.
This last one is a short one on the people area. It’s loyalty versus opportunity, and it came with an exchange between my co-author, Gary Keller, and one of our top agents. And this top agent was noticing that someone very important had left the room, and she was talking about how what they needed was more loyalty from their people. And why is it that people can’t be more loyal?
And I kind of come from that camp. I mean, look at me. I worked for the same company for over 25 years. My dad did too. Maybe it’s in my blood. We like to go someplace, and we want to stay with that team as long as we can and as long as it works. That’s just maybe my nature. But I remember Gary saying, and being thoughtful about it, he goes, “Our people don’t owe us more loyalty. We owe them more opportunity.” If people are leaving, people leave to follow opportunity. Let’s just assume that we’re all good leaders, that we’re fair leaders, that we pay fair. If they’re leaving, it’s because there wasn’t enough opportunity, and we owe them opportunity if we expect their loyalty.
That is the exchange. And if we’re creating it, our best people will stick around, which goes back to my first point, right? Careers and contractors. We’ve got to be building opportunity, a career path for them if we expect them to stick around. And if you’ve been in business long enough to lose a top performer, you know you often have to replace them with someone who’s less experienced and more expensive, or even multiple people. It is a worthwhile investment to create opportunity for your people, so that they can build that career with you, grow with you, and keep on making that amazing return on your investment.
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Jay Papasan:
Okay, this next group is kind of about what to build and when to walk away, right? They’re all kind of around what we do and how we do it. And the first one is winners quit. And you’ve heard me talk about this. This has become kind of a platform for me. There’s giving up, and then there’s quitting, and quitting can be very strategic. I first learned this from Seth Godin. I got to meet him when he was touring and speaking for The Dip, which if you want to read the definitive book around Why Winners Quit, it’s that book, and it’s very short and very readable.
But it runs counter to so much of what we’re told. If you’ve heard the old Vince Lombardi quote, “Winners never quit and quitters never win,” I take issue with that, and so did Seth. We have to quit the things that don’t serve us, the relationships that don’t serve us, the customers that don’t serve us, you name it. There are a lot of things out there that we’re doing because they served us in a previous season or we’ve been told that they matter, but they don’t actually. We need to be a little bit more skeptical about the things that we choose and the things that we allow to choose us.
Are we really living our own life today? Winners quit because they insist on living their own life. You read about this in our book at the very end, The Five Regrets of the Dying by Bronnie Ware. The number one regret is people fail to live their own authentic life. And at the end of the day, that’s the thing that matters. That’s what they’re thinking about on their deathbed. So, quitting the things that don’t serve us, that aren’t authentically us, can maybe be the most powerful thing we do. And let me tell you, it’s very ONE Thing. We have to subtract if we want to move forward and get the things that we want. So, stop thinking that winners don’t quit. They actually do. They just do it strategically.
All right, number seven, engineering before marketing. And this could be something that a lot of you out there, especially if you’re in the software and the technology space, are gonna vehemently disagree with me on.
Here’s the thing. I can remember working with an amazing salesperson. They were the anchor of that business, and they could really generate a lot of dollars. And the thing that they could do was they would go out and they would sell something. They would figure out what their customers wanted, they’d sell it, and then he would come back to me, and then I would have to build it. And that ticked me off.
Maybe with technology that works, right? You float the ideas until the market tells you what you want. Sure. Marketing before engineering. Go test, go fail, go test, go fail. Because it used to be really expensive to engineer technology. Not so anymore. I actually think you have to engineer it with marketing in mind, but you have to build it authentically and then market what you actually have built. The trap I see, especially in the coaching and training space, is people are trying to appeal to whatever’s hot, and they’re jumping on the bandwagon, whether it’d be AI or whatever the fad is right now that they’re surfing.
The truth is they don’t have any experience there. They’re just jumping on the hype train to try to make money. And most of us can see, pretty quickly on, that they haven’t authentically lived it. They’re regurgitating other people’s advice. They haven’t actually got any hard experience behind it. Engineering kind of forces you to build it, play with it, test it before you go out and market it. That’s the camp I’m very firmly in because one, I think it has integrity, and two, I think that your marketing then is always true to what you’ve built.
And today, with content, even with technology, if we didn’t build the right thing, we can go build it again, and we can build it based on the feedback we got from our customers. So, I’m not in any way saying don’t iterate, but don’t start with the hype. Start with something that actually delivers value, your best hypothesis, get the feedback, and iterate from there. A lot of people flip that the wrong way. And man, if you’re the engineer, if you are the person who has to build the thing, if you are always at the mercy of the marketing team, your life is not pleasant.
Number eight, green pastures and graveyards. Again, this came from real-world experience. The thing that people don’t realize when they jump to a green pasture is that they’re starting over, and the starting over is what they’re looking for. They want a fresh start. They’re tired of failing at that old thing. But what it actually becomes, that green pasture is often a graveyard because they’ve started over back at zero. They’re not starting somewhere where they’ve got those hard-won lessons. There is real value to failing forward if you’re learning from your failures. Hey, guess what? That’s where a lot of these hills to die on came from. Past failures that I learned from, so I could build a better foundation in the future.
So, when someone on your team is wanting to jump on whatever the big fad is, “Hey, I want to build a new kind of funnel,” or, “I want to do marketing or this. I want to do a private podcast.” Like, we’ve done that ourselves. We’ve tried to jump on whatever felt new and novel. And I’m not saying not to do that, but be careful because the moment you jump into the new space, your knowledge, your experience goes to zero.
And if you’re using a consultant to do it, now you are a hundred percent reliable on their experience as well. So, try to find the balance. I would rather perfect my game than spend my life trying to learn other people’s games. And you look up at the people who do that, they’re going one mile in a hundred directions versus taking the time to go a hundred miles in the direction that you actually believe in and want. If you know that there’s switching costs, if you know that jumping on this new software, this new program is going to slow you down before you speed up, and you still think it’s a good idea, go for it.
Me, personally, I’m going to take a long time to adopt whatever model I’m going to bet my career or life on, and it’s going to take a lot of evidence to have someone get me to switch. Because if I’ve mastered a model that is an eighty out of a hundred, and then I’m jumping to one that’s an eighty-five out of a hundred, but I don’t even know how to drive it, much less get it out of park, I’m not going to get a maximum value out of that new system for a long time. What are the switching costs? Am I thought about it before I switch? That’s something to ask yourself. It’s something to make sure that your team’s checking in when they go all in on big changes. Are they just looking for greener pastures, or is this really a better way?
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Jay Papasan:
All right, this next bunch is all around how we think about money. And there’s some lies baked in here, and there’s some big truths. Number nine is house money is a lie. And I’ll bring it all the way back to the origin story. This is one that I actually learned from Charlie Munger when I read his mental latticework of models, right? And it was this idea of, what is it? Mental accounting.
So, I’ll give you the story. If you walk into a casino and you have two hundred dollars and you gamble for a few hours, and you look up and wow, you’ve got five hundred dollars in chips, you’re like, “I’m on a roll.” So you keep at it, but the house starts to turn the corner and you look up and now you’ve only got $300. But you say, “You know what? I’m up a hundred dollars. I’m gonna walk out.”
At the end of the day, how much money did you win or lose? You walked in with two hundred, you were up to five hundred, you walked out with three hundred. You know because I’m asking it that it’s a bit of a trick question, but I’ve had people really argue with me. They’ll say, “You won $100.” And on one truth, that is true. But there’s another truth, they actually lost $200. They had $500. They could have stepped away at that very moment in time, but they chose not to. They lost that $200, and they walked away with the $100 in net winnings.
So, we can cut it a lot of different ways, but mental accounting is one of Munger and Buffett’s mental frameworks that they used, and it says how we earn money informs how we value it. So, if you’ve just gotten a big tax return, it may not feel like real money. If you get a bonus check, a lot of people won’t treat that like earned money. I’ll tell you something. When I was a kid, if I had lost $200 in a casino, it would’ve killed me, ’cause you know how I earned my money? I had to mow yards in the Memphis humidity and heat for two $20 a yard. That would’ve been ten yards mowing in the heat that I’d just lost. To me, money was mowing yards, and so I valued it very highly.
If it comes to us cheaply, we call it house money, and we treat it frivolously, that is a huge lie. So, when you get big chunks of change, bonus checks, returns, whatever you name it, you exit something, that is when we need to be most cautious about our financial decisions ’cause we will tend to treat that money as less than earned. But if we treat it with respect, that’s how we maximize our value. So, again, house money is a lie. We have to remember how we earn money will inform our respect for it, and you should respect every dollar you have if you wanna keep it.
Number ten, never finance luxury. I can remember coming through the Great Recession. There was a moment in time where a jumbo loan, and that is a loan that you take on a luxury property. These are often more than a million dollars, right? So, there’s conventional loans that happen where most people buy, and then there were these things called jumbo loans that happen for people who need to finance much more expensive properties. Those rates were incredibly low. It was like 3.5%. And my wife and I were considering either renovating our current home or possibly renting it and buying a luxury home.
And I remember going to my financial mentor at the time, and I just said, “Our dream house is literally walking distance from our home. They just built it. It’s absolutely perfect. We could almost put all of our belongings on a cart without an engine and just roll it downhill to this house, like it would be an easy move. And you look up, money is so cheap right now. We could get 3.5% financing on this house.”
And so Gary, my very first and biggest financial kind of mentor, he’s like, “Jay, I don’t think you should buy luxury until you can afford it. Pay cash for luxury, never finance it.” Now, can’t you do it? Now, could you do that? Sure. Is the money cheap? Absolutely. But you’re not even sure that you’re buying the best kind of appreciating assets. Luxury tends to hold its value. It doesn’t always go up in value, right? These are things that there’s a very small market of people who can actually afford to buy it. And if interest rates go up, the value could actually decline.
So, people get in a lot of trouble when they start financing luxury in their life. And I remember I went back and I kind of walked through the math with Wendy, and we made the hard decision to move back into one of our rental homes for almost two years while we renovated our house from the ground up. That turned out to be one of the best financial decisions of our life. For a relatively small amount, we paid mostly cash to rebuild our home, completely brand new from the ground up, except for one bathroom that was already kind of fresh. You might hear a little regrets there. I kind of wish we’d done that one too. But we changed the value of our home dramatically. We went from being one of the lowest valued homes in the neighborhood to one of the highest valued, and it still is. It’s a very competitive home in our market, and it’s exactly the home we wanted, and we did not have to finance it. We did cash.
And so, we look up, we have a lot of equity, and we have no regrets. All we did was trade time. We had to wait a little longer. We had to pull a little bit more cash from our reserves. We had to be kind of lean and mean while we were paying for this renovation instead of just putting it all basically on a big mortgage credit card. Not against that, except when luxury is involved. So, a little controversial for those of you who love to switch your luxury automobiles every single time. You have to really be rich to afford that game, so be careful if you’re financing. Always better to pay cash for luxury. You’re never paying interest points on something that may or may not go up as much as you think.
All right. So, number 11, givers get. I’m not gonna spend a lot of time here. This is a big one for me. One of my core values is abundance. It used to be wealth. Like, I love talking about wealth building. I love writing about it. But I realized when we talk about wealth, it just sounds like I want more stuff. But abundance means that we’re building something that everyone benefits from. And that means is if our business grows, is everybody going to benefit? If our investment grows, is it more than just me and Wendy that will benefit? It’s a different kind of attitude.
And over time, I’ve made one of my core criteria. If you remember my Friendship Walk podcast, one of my core criteria around friends is they have to be net givers. I’ve found that people who are net givers are the best kind of people to have in your circle. They’re never going to overly take, you can always trust them, and guess what? When you need help, those are the kind of people who show up.
So, being that kind of person becomes kind of a moral imperative to me. So, going out in the world and just believing in the core of your heart that the people who tend to be most generous, whether it’d be through philanthropy or giving your time, whatever it is that you’re able to give, I believe in the long run, those people do live the happiest lives.
And I’m gonna say happy, they may not be the wealthiest. There’s a fair amount of evidence out there that some of the wealthiest people in the world aren’t the most generous. They can write big checks, but as a percentage of their wealth, maybe not so generous, or maybe it’s self-serving, or maybe it’s a tax hedge. I love it. I want them to keep giving. But 75% of all giving actually comes from small donors, not the big checks. We can all make a difference, and we can all lean into being better givers.
So that’s just a, not a deep thought there, but it’s a core belief. Not only do I wanna be a net giver because I believe ultimately my life will benefit from it, I wanna surround myself with them too.
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Jay Papasan:
Okay, this last little cluster is all about time. Number 12, hustle culture is a lie. One of the things that I was reading through these, like you’ve heard me rail on the hustle culture, like just put more hours at it. Just work harder, right? That is a leverage point that we can use, but it has a real limit, and it has a real cost. If we’re constantly just throwing time at problems, eventually we run out of time, and then we run out of resources, and eventually that ends in burnout.
One of the other angles that I have on hustle culture that I don’t talk about that much, sometimes the people who hustle the hardest, not only are they hiding from things, they often don’t actually understand how they themselves create value. When you don’t understand what your unique value proposition is, you tend to overcompensate with hustle. You start doing a lot of stuff for a lot of people. The people who are the clearest on what it is that they deliver value, they find it easier to say no to all the other nonsense and really focus on where they can deliver the most value.
So, let’s get rid of hustle culture. Let’s focus on getting really, really clear about what we can do better than most people, if not become the best in the world at, and focus on doing more around that instead of just hustling everywhere. That’s just a recipe for burnout, folks.
Number 13, inbox zero is a waste of time. I mean, think about email. Every time you delete one, it feels like two more show up. Like, this is the ultimate modern Sisyphean task. You are pushing the boulder up the hill. The moment you get it there, go to sleep the next morning, and it’s just gonna fill back up.
What is the point? And I know that there are adherents out there that, like, that is how they get their sanity. Well, be really clear. You are doing that for your sanity. You’re not doing it to be productive. It is one of the least productive things you can do. And today, now we’ll go back to AI, this is where I want AI to help me clear the clutter, so I can identify the handful of things in my inbox that actually matter and focus my time on those things and delete or unsubscribe for the rest.
Ultimate gift I had one year is when I had to switch emails. I deleted 4000 emails from my inbox. Guess what? Nobody complained. I don’t think I lost any opportunities. If you’ve ever been at that moment where you’re staring at the number 5000, 10,000, I’ve had as high as 26,000 unread emails in my inbox, and you just hit select all-delete, it is one of the most liberating things you can do. That’s what I’m talking about with inbox zero. Just get rid of it all. But going through and managing it all is a utter waste of time.
Now, I’ll just say this. Merlin Mann is the person who coined this. He even complained that people took his language, inbox zero, and turned it into something he never intended, folks. So, if you even go back to the origin, inbox zero is not what it ended up. It became kind of a productivity mantra, inbox zero, inbox zero, and people felt righteous and good for doing it, but that was never what it was intended. And I’ll just attest, and Mann would too, that it’s kind of a waste of time, folks.
Number 14, this is kind of a joke, but I’m gonna do it for my sister. Daylight savings time is an utter joke. Come on, can we please get with it, folks? This is something that throws off our sleep twice a year, and it’s doing it for almost zero reason at all. It’s been around, and every two or three years, there’s a movement in Congress to get rid of it. Some states have gotten ahead of it. I think three or four states now don’t have it. God bless you. I wish I was living in one of them. Can we just get behind this whole thing that disrupts our business cycle, our sleep cycle? And if you’ve got little kids, it’s a nightmare, much less your dogs. They wake up an hour early or an hour late wanting their food. This is craziness, folks. Can we just get past it? So, a little bit of a joke, but it’s also maybe a cry for help. Can we finally get around to just getting rid of it so we can have one clock that we’re on year-round?
Number 15, credit is the cheapest thing that you’ll ever give. Now, I’m a writer. This is important, but increasingly what I see out in the Internet and the social sphere is people repurposing other people’s ideas, and they’re not crediting the people who created them. It’s so cheap to do. It just takes a beat to say that that was Merlin Mann’s original idea, to go back to the source. And I’m not perfect, but I do try to make an effort to always credit the people whose ideas I’m sharing.
And this is one of the things I do better than almost anything else. Maybe I have some original ideas, but I feel like I’m really good at digging through history and finding really relevant ideas to the conversations we’re having and then re-sharing them. Some ideas are old. Maybe they’ve seen their time and they’re out of vogue, and they can be reborn. They can be pulled back to the present and made relevant again, and it just gives credit to those people who originated them.
There’s not a lot of original thought out there, so let’s go ahead and give credit where it’s due. And today with AI, your ChatGPT, your Claude, Perplexity, whatever you use, it’s pretty easy to figure out where your ideas are coming from, but it won’t show up in your copy if you don’t ask. So, credit is the cheapest thing you’ll ever give. I’m a firm believer of it because as we move into a place where authenticity will be even more valued, when people realize that you’re just recirculating other people’s ideas and not giving them credit, you lose that, and you lose that trust with the people you’re counting on to be in business with.
All right, so that’s the 15 hills that I’m prepared to die on. Some serious, some a little frivolous, maybe daylight savings, but I really want that to happen. I’ll give you a bonus one. Here’s one that I’ve abandoned because it’s important if you establish these things that you believe in that you also be prepared to rethink it when the ground truths have changed. For most of my body of work, I leaned into the idea of discipline is freedom that we optimize. And I think there’s an optimization point where we fall over a cliff into maximizing everything.
And what I’ve increasingly learned, and you’ve heard it from my Oliver Burkeman interview, where we talked about Jevons paradox, that when we optimize things, what we’re ultimately doing is we’re opening up a channel to actually do more work. What we have to do is realize what was it when we get time back, that that discipline has earned us a choice, not a default answer, to just do more and more and more. The default answer for many of you is to do more. What our choice should be is, do we wanna spend more time at work? Do we wanna spend more time with our kids? Do I wanna go for a walk with my dog? Do I wanna read a book? Do I wanna go to a spa? Do I wanna go to a vacation? We’re not actually looking at the space that we’re able to create through the productivity that we live as a choice.
So, let’s get out of our default answer, which for me, for many years was, “Can I optimize better?” It’s one of the reasons I became the author of the book. Like, I was really, really looking for what’s the twenty percent of the twenty percent of the twenty percent all the time. And optimizing is good to a point, but eventually, you have to settle into a rhythm, and you also have to use some of those gains to get your life back to do other things.
I’ve said it a few times. When the measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure. If we’re always measuring everything, trying to make everything better, at a certain point, that becomes the pursuit. How much can I do in a day? How many emails can I triage in an hour? It is great to test those ideas, can we do better? But if the point is always to be perpetually kind of maximizing every single minute, we’re gonna look up, and we’re just gonna be exhausted and empty. So, I’ve kind of backed away from that, and you’ve heard it in multiple podcasts. I want to use productivity to buy more choice in my life, not just so I can do more.
All right? That’s where I will leave you, and I will give you a challenge. My challenge to you is ask the question: Am I clear about what I believe? Do I have a system for when I make a bad mistake, that I don’t have to repeat it? And ultimately, for me, these hills I die on, I call them my mental models, a lot of them have showed up in my writing of The Twenty Percenter, is a way to keep me from learning from the same mistake again and again.
And I would encourage you, maybe open up a note on your phone, and as you make mistakes and learn from them, maybe you can start your own latticework of mental models like Warren and Buffett or like your good friend Jay Papasan on The ONE Thing podcast. Are you learning from your mistakes in a way that allow you not to live them again and again? ‘Cause I promise you, until you learn, life will keep teaching you folks.
That’s it for this week. I hope you’ve enjoyed my 15 hills to die on and one that I’ve abandoned. We’ll see you next week.
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